The near-Earth space is the best reachable plasma laboratory, as it can be probed by constellation satellite missions as well as modelled by high-resolution top-notch supercomputing simulations.
Understanding plasma phenomena occurring in our neighbourhood is imperative also because we have increasing investments in space, and we are critically dependent on space-based applications.
Space poses a fruitful testbed for high-performance computing (HPC) applications not only because of the vast volume it covers, but also due to the difficult physics involved.
The recently increased computational resources have offered a possibility to abandon the traditional approximations in large-scale models. Vlasiator is the world’s most accurate near-Earth space simulation, a unique European flagship code that can be used to finally understand the complex dynamics in the near-Earth space.This proposal presents an ambitious science case to understand foreshock – magnetosphere interaction.
The simulation results will be important to shed light on a curious chain of events that was recently proposed, where foreshock-generated high-speed plasma jets could cause the magnetospheric tail to erupt. The project's recent Nature-family publications show that investigating this in a single simulation volume is finally possible using an ion-kinetic code, where these phenomena occur based on first principles.